Forbidden Stories and Unbreakable Cycles
Elizabeth Flux on Madeleine Thien’s Do Not Say We Have Nothing (2016)
There’s a man watching as events unfold in the weeks leading up to the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. Despite the growing feeling of hope in the air, despite the sense of optimism that perhaps these students are going to have an impact—to bring greater freedom to modern China—this man isn’t buying it.
‘I came to see what’s gotten everyone so worked up. Of course, I admire their ideals. Who doesn’t? But even a nothing like me can see that the students and the government aren’t speaking the same language. Everyone wants to fix the country, but everyone wants power, too, don’t they?’ This unnamed man is a fleeting character—after this scene readers won’t see him again. But in the brief paragraphs he occupies, the man looks back to his own generation and feels that hard-won lessons still haven’t been learned, even after decades of death, famine and displacement suffered by tens of millions. ‘How come we keep arriving at the same point?’ he asks.
One of the main concerns of Madeleine Thien’s 2016 novel Do Not Say We Have Nothing is cycles; of repeated mistakes and the inability to break free of the paths laid out for us by society, by political forces outside our control. The novel follows two Chinese families through multiple generations, starting in the 1940s and stretching into the 2000s. In the early 1990s, Ai-ming, a student fleeing the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square massacre moves to Canada and is taken in by Marie and her mother. From here, the complex connection between the two girls’ families is slowly teased out over the course of the novel.
Do Not Say We Have Nothing is an epic undertaking—it frequently moves between eras and perspectives. The novel tracks the rise of Chairman Mao, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution and finally, the Tiananmen Square massacre; events that, on my first reading in 2016, were in most cases familiar to me only by name. Thien’s eye for detail and characterisation makes each generation feel as familiar and as current as the next. As a reader you quickly invest in all of these interlinked lives. You watch one character, Sparrow, grow from a young boy travelling across war-torn China with his mother and aunt, to a promising composer, to a resigned man forced to put aside his passions until the Tiananmen Square protests awaken something in him. ‘He had only lived a half life,’ Thien narrates. From the very first pages, readers are told that Sparrow is doomed—we’re told that in June 1989 he will die. Other than that, we don’t have the specifics. It makes getting to know him all the more bittersweet.
In tracing the multiple perspectives and journeys as seen through the eyes of the displaced, Do Not Say We Have Nothing shows a parallel history, a reality that still exists in living memory but which can be difficult to believe. So much has been omitted from the official record, and people struggle to put together the pieces, to understand. This is one of the reasons why books such as this are so important—it’s easy to lose the emotion of history, and to forget how recent it all is. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that what now seems unfathomable could, very easily, become reality again.
Horrific things happen across Do Not Say We Have Nothing. There are brutal executions. Scenes of torture. People severely and disproportionately punished for not conforming to rapidly evolving rules. However, Thien writes tragedy without descending into trauma porn—the author isn’t flexing her writing muscles purely to prove she can pull on your emotions. Instead, Thien interrogates truths while also putting faces on events that otherwise might be made abstract or seen at a remove; as such she is adding to a historical record that at different times in history has been at threat of being erased.
In the book, multiple generations come in contact with an incomplete manuscript they refer to as the ‘Book of Records’. It tells the fictional story of two characters making their way across China. At multiple points the characters in Do Not Say We Have Nothing copy out the text, make changes, add to the story themselves. It’s never known what happens to the characters in the Book of Records because too many chapters are missing. This meta-narrative echoes the novel itself; both are a fictional telling of true events, with the fates of many characters left unknown. In a reflection of real life Thien resists the urge to offer easy conclusions, telling the story of an event whose effects are still reverberating throughout Chinese society and the wider diaspora today; millions of Chinese died or were displaced during the Cultural Revolution. The names of those killed in the Tiananmen Square massacre have never officially been released, and we still don’t know how many lost their lives.
In a later section of the novel, Sparrow’s mother—a tough woman known affectionately as ‘Big Mother Knife’—who has lost loved ones across different decades, across different campaigns, in a multitude of different ways, briefly finds herself reflecting on all that has slipped away. ‘She tried not to think … of all the names that would disappear completely, relegated to history so as not to disturb the living.’
To readers, this loss is represented most acutely by Sparrow, a character who carries memories of so many phases of China’s history that when he is snuffed out, so too are the stories he carries. The importance of keeping a record, of telling stories, is emphasised throughout the novel. Whether that is through the Book of Records, or a list of names scribbled inside the lid of a suitcase, remembering has value. Even if lessons aren’t learnt, it is the act of remembering that matters.
The theme of remembrance is further emphasised through Thien’s deft manipulation of form. She immerses readers in the world she is creating through more than just words; the novel is dotted with Chinese characters, with graphs, with photographs, with snippets from musical scores. It all flows naturally—none of it feels like a gimmick. In particular, Marie’s dissection of the Chinese language gives insight into how her mind works, and how language can reveal distinct cultural perspectives:
‘In English, consciousness and unconsciousness are part of a vertical plane, so that we wake up ↑ and fall ↓ asleep and we sink ↓ into a coma. Chinese uses the horizontal line so that to wake is to cross a border towards consciousness → and to faint is to go back ←.’
While Thien’s printed words remain the same, static, it’s fascinating how they take on different meaning as the world swirling around them changes.
A year before Do Not Say We Have Nothing was released, City University in Hong Kong shut down one of its creative writing programs. Writing for The Guardian at the time, Thien expressed her concerns about what this meant. ‘I hesitate to use the incendiary words of censorship, freedom of speech and intellectual freedom. However, it has become increasingly clear to me, as events have unfolded, that these are precisely the issues.’
Despite her concerns, Hong Kong is still seen by her characters as a safe haven and a beacon of freedom. Characters flee there, or consider booking passage to the city as things grow more dangerous on the mainland. But in the five years since the book was published things have changed, rapidly.
In Do Not Say We Have Nothing, characters watch as books and music are censored, as protests are decried as foolish and senseless, as freedoms are stripped away. People are taught, often brutally, that they have no choice but to accept the current reality as it is. For me, it has been five years between readings, and what first felt more like a look at the way past horrors has crept into the present, now feels like a story of cycles that won’t be broken. What once felt like a book shining a light on the ugliness of the past, and the way it still resonates, feels as though, were it to be written now, yet another phase of the cycle would be added. Once again music and words are being censored, once again millions-strong protests are taking place and being decried—democracy is under threat. Elections have been cancelled. Pro-democracy politicians have been arrested. Press freedom has been diminished. And under the new national security law people are harshly punished for vaguely defined slights against the mainland. Displaying a banner asking for liberation is now apparently enough to warrant an arrest.
Do Not Say We Have Nothing is about the tragedy of unfinished stories, of potential and passion quashed where individuals lose themselves as they are forced to conform to a reality dictated by sociopolitical forces. Through this, Thien shows how brutally people in politically oppressive societies can be made to adhere to a closed loop, one where they have little agency in changing, yet so much of themselves are at stake.
It’s a story of cycles—and now that we are standing at a different point in time, it makes the novel hit harder. It is both prescient and resigned, dwelling on how each generation in a new decade tries to act differently from the one before.
‘I think we keep repeating the same mistakes,’ Ai-ming tells a friend during the student protests in Tiananmen Square. ‘Maybe we should mistrust every idea we think is original and ours alone.’
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Elizabeth Flux is an award-winning writer, editor-at-large for the Melbourne City of Literature office, and the editor of The Victorian Writer. In 2019 and 2020 she was a convening judge for the VPLAs. Her fiction and nonfiction work has been widely published.